NBA.com has its offseason report card for the Thunder: “Thunder went from being a team with potential to a contender in the span of a year. They pushed the defending champion Lakers to six games in the first round despite being the eighth seed. They’re aiming higher this season. Durant gets the majority of the headlines, and deservedly so after being the youngest player ever to win a scoring title. He relishes the role as a leader, always putting the team above his individual success. But Durant is hardly alone in the elite department. Westbrook, a teammate at the FIBA World Championships, is a budding All-Star. The Thunder went into the offseason armed with cap space and Draft picks, but general manager Sam Presti stuck with the organization’s deliberate plan of sustained growth. Instead of foolishly fishing for those big catches in free agency, OKC locked up its own with Durant staying halfway through the next decade. Smart.”

KD told Chris Tomasson of FanHouse he’s not the tourney MVP or even deserving of the All-Worlds team: “As for players Durant believes could unseat him for the all-tournament team, he mentioned New Zealand’s Kirk Penney, averaging 24.7 points, China’s Yi Jianlian, at 20.2, and Iran’s Hamed Haddadi, at 20.0. Those three weren’t even on teams that made the final eight. But Durant eventually did concede that “you got to put somebody on that team from America” if Team USA wins gold. But in typical Durant fashion he mentioned several Americans he believed would be just as worthy as him.” Keep Reading…

For whatever reason, I got started reading basketball stories three years old last night. I really don’t know why, but nevertheless, most were pretty fascinating to look over. And if you remember, three years ago, a guy just completed his freshman year at Texas and was just drafted into the NBA. So this Kevin Durant guy was having a number of stories written about him.

The coach put him through shooting drills, passing drills and dribbling drills. An AAU official walked in one day and found Durant in the gym, running and dribbling up and down the scuffed-up court with baby-blue three-point lines, making layups. No one else was around. Durant’s grandmother brought supper to him at the activity center. He ate a bite or two, left the plate and sauntered back to the bin of old, smoothed balls. Durant did his homework in the study room, napped behind a curtain in the gym and practiced until past dark. Brown gave Durant a quotation to remember: Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. He made Durant write it 200 times on a piece of notebook paper.

Well, the DT Shirt Summer Vacation Gallery got an overwhelming response from you readers in the form of four total submissions in an attempt to win a free DT shirt. But I’ll accept the blame for that because I didn’t think of it until summer was half over. Next summer we’ll do it again but launch it before Memorial Day.

Daily Thunder reader Grant Wilson of Norman is the winner of the aforementioned DT shirt. The random selection process involved the highly scientific process of me putting numbers one through four on folded small pieces of paper, and Mrs. Patrick James pulling the one that represented Grant out of a Thunder hat. A hearty thanks to the other folks who submitted photos. Grant has opted to wait to claim his prize until the new DT shirts launch sometime soon.

Grant’s winning snapshot came on a vacation he took in July with his wife Meg and her family in Maine at Acadia National Park. Grant, as you can see, was sporting his WHY NOT? playoffs T-shirt as he stood next to his brother-in-law, 10-year-old Ethan. Bonus points (that did not influence his victory, I assure you) for Ethan’s Kevin Durant shirt and especially for the location of the shot: Thunder Hole, a chasm on the coast.

Grant says he’s an avid Thunder fan who has been to a lot of home games, including the team’s not-so-epic first game against Milwaukee in October 2008 and the epic Game 3 playoffs win against the Lakers.

“Best sporting event I’ve ever been to,” he said.

Grant’s an Oklahoma State University grad who holds a University of Oklahoma law degree, which for a lot of people around these parts is either his saving grace or what makes him a traitor. But he contends he only wears OSU orange and Thunder blue when it comes to local sports gear.

So thanks again for those who participated. Check out the other submissions below. Keep Reading…

Larry W. Smith/NBAE via Getty Images

We’ve all seen the video. Nenad Krstic threw some punches, tossed a chair, then got slapped with a suspension. And in a recent interview with HoopsHype, Krstic says he got what he deserved.

Do you think your punishment after the Greece-Serbia brawl was fair?

NK: I deserved it. But I didn’t deserve the talk in the newspaper. I’m not one person to get in fights on the court, but I was just trying to protect my teammates.

Like you said, you don’t look like a guy that’s going to get involved in fights. What happened to you there?

NK: Nothing. I think everybody who knows me knows that I’m going to have their their back if there is a fight or a problem or anything like that. I always have my teammates’ backs. So there was a fight, I saw my teammate lying down on the court and I tried to help. And they attacked me and whoever attacks me, I’m going to attack him.

You hear that KD? Nenad’s got your back, yo. But despite the fight being ugly and the chair toss certainly embarrassing, the brawl did show exactly that. Krstic will be there for his teammates. And that might be something that comes in handy this season as the entire Thunder roster has a big target on their backs.

People are going to try and rough up the mild mannered Kevin Durant. People are going to push KD, shove KD and maybe even a few will take a cheap shot or two. But if you do, you might just be getting a chair to the face.

Free Darko with more on Durant: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s a modesty and restraint to Durant that sets him apart from other superstars. Yet there’s simply no way to look on Durant mid-game and not see something vicious, even tormented, in his eyes. Sometimes, Tim Duncan gets riled in the playoffs; otherwise, he glides along the pathways to victory with a detachment often mistaken for disinterest. That in no way describes what it’s like to watch Kevin Durant play. He possesses all the swagger of his peers, it’s just been sublimated, or shoved deep down inside so it’s even more combustible. Durant isn’t a throwback to some genteel sporting past. But, it should be noted, that past never really existed the way people want it to today.”

Jack McCallum of SI with a pretty outstanding column on Team USA: “There is much roster confusion, too. All over Turkey I’ve been asked, “Where is Kobe Bryant?” for it is Black Mamba’s likeness that is plastered on the billboards advertising the tournament. In the window of the Nike store on Istiklal, one of Istanbul’s main commercial thoroughfares, are displayed two U.S. jerseys: Bryant’s No. 10 and LeBron James’ No. 6. An English-language newspaper in Istanbul did accurately point to the real U.S. star with a Monday headline that read “Durant and Friends Lead U.S. Into Angola Test,” but ran a photo of Chauncey Billups instead of Durant.” Keep Reading…

I hope this Labor Day finds you well. Yes, there were no Bolts for the day, so I hope you were able to somehow figure out how to get through your morning. It was tough for me too.

But as you relax, think about this: Only 21 days until training camp. That’s three weeks. That’s… not very far away. So if you’re not totally in that fired up mode for the 2010-11 season, this Thunder mix should help. It’s probably one of the best ones I’ve seen. And trust me, I spend a lot of time on YouTube.

This week Nick Gibson of SLAM Online returns to give us an on site report of how our Thunder players are holding up in Turkey. We talk Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, Nenad Krstic, and about our boy Tibor Pleiss as well as plenty of chatter regarding the FIBA tournament and everyone’s favorite subject Ricky Rubio.

Be sure to check in next week for our live call in show taking place after the gold medal game. Take a minute and subscribe to our new iTunes channel that’s linked, then listen, and then enjoy.